


you've gotta love the house you're in

by cartographies



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 08:16:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2102208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You are out practice with tenderness, aren’t you, Athos?” she says very quietly. “So am I. But I think I am beginning to learn.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	you've gotta love the house you're in

**Author's Note:**

> INFINITE THANKS TO SONIA FOR LOOKING IT OVER FOR ME, also for stuff like encouragement on twitter and emailing me about songs that reminded her of these three. 
> 
> Title courtesy of Moonface.

Constance is eighteen years old when her younger brother Aumary is killed in a tavern brawl.

She is returning home from a destination that later she will not be able to recall at all. Walking up her street she sees the sort of scene that draws Parisians like flies: dim light emanating from a door, and men gathered around a form spilled from it out into the mud.

Constance had joined, Constance had gaped and whispered and then she spotted the brightness of Aumary’s hair, the shock of his freckles against his pale face.

She does not remember much after that. She fell to her knees, was drawn back up, and threw herself to her knees again. She had covered her brother’s body with hers. The next thing she remembers out of that whirling torrent of grief is a man leading her gently to a bench. Constance does not remember, either, much of what the man had said to her.

What she does recall is a clear moment out of the fog, a view of his face slicing through the haze and thinking, this man knows this moment, the one she is in: where you know with certainty that whoever you were before is gone, refolded abruptly into a new shape around that hollow point and then cast out, legless and blind, into every moment that follows.

She thinks with a shock while looking at him that it is more than that. He is in that moment with her. That is ridiculous, he does not, did not, know her brother. Before he passes her into the care of a friend she remembers that he introduced himself as Athos, of the King’s Musketeers.

Just doing his duty, then. Keeping the King’s peace. The peace where boys are gutted over a game of cards and their killers slip out through the back door and into the ether, where brothers die and some tender part of their sister's souls die with them.

 

* * *

 

In the weeks after Constance’s kidnapping her husband’s house becomes a trap, one all the more difficult to bear because it is one that her hand was forced to sign herself into willingly.

She would like to have some poignant drama to draw on for the reason she married in the first place. But Constance had no father that beat her or family that cast her out. With an irony painful to her now, the only reason she can give is that she got an unwise amount of freedom early on and had grown overly attached to it.

Her mother had died when she was eight, her father several years after that. The day after her mother’s funeral, all the extended family gone, Constance put on her mother’s apron (so long on her she had to fold it double) and dragged a turned over wash pail to the stove and set to cooking dinner. From then on, she had always been the woman of the house, giving orders to everyone and fussing over her brothers in equal measure.

Her elder brothers were well into their teens by the time their mother died, already one foot in the world of men. They were affectionate and kind, but not frequently at home, and perhaps never truly recognized the ease with which the efforts of their small sister allowed their lives to run.

Aumary was another story entirely. Only two years younger than she, constantly underfoot, Constance’s special responsibility and treasured companion since the moment of his birth. She remembers teaching him his numbers and letters at the scarred wooden table in the kitchen, although she had only just learned them herself.

He was so similar to her in feature and temperament that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. The same rashness that Constance had taught herself to carefully disguise was one that she never truly discouraged or reproached in him.

No one else had either, whether within the family or outside of it, but this was not a fact that did much to relieve the burden of guilt she would later place upon her own shoulders.

When they were children - and beyond that point, when they should have known better - Constance and Aumary had often indulged in their fantasy of running away together. He would not have to apprentice himself to any trade and she wouldn’t have to marry. They would be traveling players, jugglers, highwaymen; they would leave Paris and set up a home far away from any shadow of responsibility, far away from the inevitable future of either of them leaving or being left, which had seemed to them to be the definition of adult life.

Constance supposes that they weren’t far off the mark, on that last bit.

The baby of the family, spoiled and indulged, led to believe there was no solution the problem his charm could not ultimately solve, dead in the gutter at an age where he could hardly be called a man.

Constance did the leaving next, operating under the belief that at least it was on her own terms.

Her eldest brother had married, to a woman who she pettily disliked, and their silly battle of wills was undertaken to hide the fact Constance no longer had a place or a purpose, or a younger brother to spin her the lie of the possibility of any other kind of life.

She had accepted Monsieur Bonacieux’s offer of marriage, the first to be issued after Constance’s internal resolution that the best thing for her was to move on. To marry, she thought, was the only way for a woman to have a life of her own. It was easy to conceive of her family as the lock on her unhappiness and a household of her own, children to love, the independent choice to be sensible, as the key.

In the years that follow she will come to think that her mistake was in her choice of husband, a matter of degree more than anything. She never did feel she really understood the fervor that Fleur and Therese held for the teachings of Ninon de Larroque. It’s worse, she once thinks resentfully, than being like Fleur who wanted to break down doors she knew would most likely always be bared to her. Constance does not know what she wants at all. There are no intellectual words, no rhetorical flourishes, to express the nameless hunger that she feels, no goal to focus it upon, and so she feels it slowly die. A hunger beyond hunger, the kind where the body’s every sense dulls to protect itself from the ache.

The moment where she had agreed to help d’Artagnan in some mad scheme, where she fired a gun amidst the sounds of clashing swords and dying men did not produce a sudden revelation. That mingled horror and thrill provided no enlightenment of her discontent.

But suddenly, she had been famished, her every nerve ending alive and screaming for a substance whose source remained just as impenetrable.

When she sends d’Artagnan away for the second time, she prays only for that dullness to visit her again, a final time, and that it be so all encompassing and total it could not be lifted by anyone ever again.

 

* * *

 

If Athos had thought that would be like lancing a wound, he was mistaken. If he had believed that in letting Anne go, in sparing her life, that it would be as if his hand had reached through the years and stayed the hangman’s, he soon knows the lie. He had imagined that act of mercy would be a nice bit of arithmetic: the debt repaid, cancelled out, his life rewritten for him.

He would have settled for a weight lifted. For that one moment watching her retreating back it was, and the heady relief of that lightness is enough to carry him for days.

The inevitable crash is, in a word, spectacular. The knowledge that any singular act of his cannot erase that one great moment, the crack running across the center of him, is enough to undo him. It’s like thinking that that the sword through your side is a clean wound, no problem, just get it sewn up nicely and leave it to heal. Then you realize it isn’t clean at all. It’s a jagged, bloody wreck, and you are left to stumble about, trying desperately to hold your guts in.

Athos faces up to some facts on his way to drinking himself into a stupor. He is still half in love with her, a quarter, perhaps less than that - or in love with the idea of her, the shape of lost possibility. But the fact that it exists at all, even the tiniest drop, a thing with presence and weight becomes, as he sits in grim, dour lodgings, almost too terrible to bear.

The shame of it, the slithering disgust sliding hot between his ribs. Not because of her, not disgust at what type of man could feel something towards the actual sort of person she had turned out to be, but rather what he had done. What name do you give a man who still dares to feel even the ghosts of tenderness or longing, for a woman he’d had strung up?

Athos goes out into a chill rain and kneels in the mud of the Rue san Jacques and finds the locket he had cast off, it’s face cracked. Sits there and bursts into peals of mirth with midnight pressing close around him, laughing until he cries, hand gripping the talisman until the glass opens a thin line of blood on his palm.

 

* * *

 

Her husband, in the days and weeks following his threat, does nothing she has been led to expect a scorned husband of a wayward wife to do. There are no rules laid down for her to follow, and little monitoring of her goings and comings, at least as far as she can see. Constance thinks what is happening may be worse.

The attitude he adopts towards her most of the time is one of constant, relentless solicitude, punctuated by bits of hyperbolic self-loathing, a pathetic show of gratefulness towards her, and the never-ending implication that her presence is the only thing holding the man together.

The rest of the time he is as has always been, cold, critical in a way that to the outside observer might not seem negative at all. It isn’t anything in particular that he says, but rather the sum total of his attitude, a tone that implies that really he wants to believe the best in her, but she is simply refusing to oblige him in her constant shortcomings.

As weeks pass and she thinks her sanity is about to become the cost of her husband’s continued life, Athos shows up on her doorstep one chilly morning.

Opening the door and seeing him there, she feels her hand fly to her throat, dread stopping her tongue, but before she can voice her fear he says quickly, “D’Artagnan is fine.” Constance feels herself breathe again.

Allowing herself to shrug off the aftereffects of the terror that had gripped her, that Athos had come tell her d’Artagnan was dead, maimed, lost to them, she can think clearly enough to see that Athos looks distinctly awkward. She would be hard pressed to pinpoint what exactly in his body language is giving the impression, as he looks precisely as he always does.

“I just - I’ve come, if it isn’t an intrusion, I’ve merely come to pay a visit.”

Constance blinks slowly in surprise. Then she narrows her eyes, and speaks in a voice that comes out very far from the firm rebuke she had intended.

“Did he send you?” She says it to stop the other questions twisting in her stomach: _How is he?_ and even worse: _Do you think he ever thinks of me?_

Athos shakes his head, bemused. “No. I merely felt that after the events of several weeks ago, it was only right for me to check on you.”

The words sound slightly wooden, rehearsed, but genuine. She takes a quick account of Athos. He does not seem how she would have expected, given the evident catharsis that had taken place the last time she had seen him. He is pale, ill at ease, his eyes shadowed.

Constance can feel the tightening at the corner of her eyes that signals oncoming tears, at the simple act of someone bothering to see how she was doing. She does not blame d’Artagnan for staying away. He was only doing as she had asked, and the rest of them - she had no claims of friendship upon them, not really.

To hide the sudden wave of emotion she invites Athos in, overly cheerful, as if him paying visits to her home alone and outside the need of a safe place to talk about musketeers business was a common occurrence.

 

* * *

 

There is a palpable awkwardness once they are seated in her familiar, cozy kitchen. Athos had always regarded Constance as something slightly above an acquaintance, which for him was about as close as anyone outside of Aramis and Porthos had gotten to being a friend. She had often come with her husband on his errands to the garrison. While Bonacieux prattled away to Treville, Constance and he had often made easy conversation.

He remembers one day, a year on from Anne, Aramis and Porthos and he still something new and raw, talking to Constance and realizing that he enjoyed it. The dumb shock of that moment, of having present experience equal simple, unburdened pleasure, was a sensation so long dormant that he had not even recognized it for what it was it all the times before.

Now he watches her covertly as she moves about, preparing food and drink. D’Artagnan had told them the bare facts of what had taken place between them after their reunion in the alley, and the way his features had hardened in grief had spoke eloquently enough to the fact that he did not want to speak further on the subject.

Athos had been telling the truth, then, when he said he felt a responsibility to call on her after the trauma she had undergone. D’Artagnan had spoken of Constance expressing that she felt she couldn’t be in his company, and thus the weeks had passed with an unspoken but wide berth given to the Bonacieux home.

Athos does not necessarily imagine that the sudden lack of their presence, tromping through her sitting room and kitchen as they use her house as an impromptu meeting spot, would count as a loss to Constance, but it was sure to leave a certain gap. Her pragmatic open-heartedness towards them when they had need of her deserved better than to be repaid with abrupt silence.

Once they are settled, light but satisfying meal before them, he seems to find that ability to talk without stress with Constance entirely gone.

“Your husband. He is away?”

Constance gives him a wry look. “Would I have let you in if he weren’t, you mean? No. Probably not.”

Athos finds himself looking at the place on her cheek where she had been cut. All that remains is the faintest of bruises. He puts his hand to the same spot on his own face and fumbles out a “How are you…?”

“Oh,” Constance says, with a brittle laugh, “no lasting damage.”

“Well. I meant - it must have been a traumatic experience in other ways.”

Constance shrugs. “I suppose. It probably would not register as such to you. You face death daily.”

“Not like that. Not without the possibility of a fair fight. And we accept it as part of the life we lead.”

He can’t give parse the look that Constance gives him then. But all she says is “Yes. I always rather thought that if I was kidnapped it would be for a more personal reason than mere convenience.” Her tone is flippant, but edged with something else.

Another pause. Athos is wondering why he really came here. He had found his feet pointed towards her home without true deep thought on what he could offer once he had arrived. The specter of who and what led to that fading mark on her cheekbone hangs heavy in the air, an obstruction to anything more meaningful than vague pleasantries.

He sees Constance open her mouth to speak, snap it shut, then come to some inner resolution, the evidence of which settles in the newly determined set of her shoulders. “How are you, Athos?”

Athos just blinks at her.

“I mean, you came to check on me, but I’m fine. It seems to me that you had a distressing time as well.”

Athos feels a sudden surge of panic, an instinct to look for exits. Years of habit in the art of deflecting from anything surrounding his past have wormed their way deep into all his responses. Since the night he told the other three his story in full, in a flat, steady voice, allowing no pauses, no faltering, lest he not be able to start up again, he has not found himself in possession of a new found forthrightness. Attempts to discuss it by Aramis and Porthos were almost nonexistent on their part and easily sidestepped on his.

D’Artagnan is not so easily avoided. He often gives Athos a look that says he is willing to wait, but not for very long.

Now it is Constance who is looking at him with her brisk, warm concern. It is not that the others have not realized that Athos is not doing as well as he ought in the aftermath. But they are long set in their ways. The rule of not asking, but waiting instead for each other to volunteer information, has been the practice in his friendships. The problem is that they almost never volunteer it until some outside motivator shows to all involved that ‘alright’ is far from being the standard order of operation.

He realizes how long he has been silent, when Constance reaches over to gently touch his hand.

Athos clears his throat. “Yes, I’m quite well. It was merely the resolution of something that happened years ago.”

There is a quick rising and falling of Constance’s brows that signals doubt, but she only says, “If that is the case, you must feel much better then.”

Athos almost protests, comes close to joking that he did not realize he was in a bad way before, but quickly thinks better of it. There is no need to insult Constance’s intelligence in that way.

“No. Any change that I thought such a meeting was likely to produce has failed to appear.”

“Well, perhaps that’s your problem,” says Constance. At his puzzled look, she sighs. “If you’re thinking of it as only tying up a loose end, instead of as something of it’s own to be dealt with.”

Constance looks a bit uncomfortable at the unexpected intimacy the conversation has taken, but with the practical, workaday bravery he realizes he has come to associate uniquely with her, she stubbornly forges ahead.

“I remember,” Constance says softly, “that when my brother died, after a few months I thought I was fine. People die; you move on. Everyone else had. But then came the day, after a year had passed, when I had to clean out his room - not had too, I suppose. I was going to be married in a few days and - well. I thought I was the one that ought to do it. My sister-in-law came in, and found me on the floor in front of his trunk, weeping over one of his dirty shirts. You never truly face a thing until long after the moment when you thought you already had.”

Athos, around a throat suddenly made tight, admits: “I think maybe I am still facing it.”

Constance looks at him with an open affection that is quickly smothered by the adopted tone of a teacher with a pupil who has finally grasped some inexact and complex lesson, but with an accompanying squeeze of the fingers that he realizes have been resting warm over his own, all this time.

“Maybe there’s some hope for the good sense of you musketeers after all.”

 

* * *

 

Although d’Artagnan has demonstrated time and again how keen his skills of observation are, somehow the moment where he confronts Athos about his visits to Madame Bonacieux still comes as a surprise.

Athos feels instantly guilty, although nothing in d’Artagnan’s demeanour suggests anger or surprise. He seems melancholy, however, which is worse.

“How is she?” D’Artagnan’s eyes had been tracking the movements of Aramis and Porthos as they sparred in the courtyard by torchlight, but now they meet Athos’ own.

“She seems...as she usually does, I suppose.”

After that first visit he didn’t call with anything approaching regularity, but as the weeks passed he found himself showing up at random, although he would leave if there was any sign that the master of the house was in residence. His words to d’Artagnan are not strictly true. Constance seemed subdued, wrapped up in her own thoughts. Over the course of his visits he had come to the conclusion that perhaps the Constance he and the others had gotten to see was not the one presented to all.

“So she could be anything at all.” D’Artagnan says. Athos looks at him questioningly.

“Constance is good at hiding her feelings, I think,” d’Artagnan answers after a moment.

There is sadness and longing in his tone, d’Artagnan’s desire to see Constance coming from the knowledge that he possesses the code that would unlock any truth her outward demeanour might try to hide. Athos feels a stab of jealousy at that confidence, whether it is warranted on d’Artagnan’s part or not. Athos can never really remove the doubt he holds about the possibility of anyone being able to truly know anyone else, or the feeling that it is ludicrous to even begin the attempt.

Although he thinks anyone who met them now might be surprised to hear it, his friendship with Aramis and Porthos had not come easily or naturally. To make any two people fit together with that level of comfort is a wonder, much less three, that it would be nice to attribute it to some miraculous and effortless meeting of souls.

He would also like to say it was achieved because they worked at it, but that is also untrue. If there was no mythical coming together, he thinks in his more sentimental moments that there might have been something magical in it nonetheless, that the three of them had managed to tolerate each other long enough that their rough edges and dark corners were worn away and reshaped into something new by time and shared experience.

D’Artagnan has been something new altogether. The totalness with which he has managed to embed himself in their lives might almost seem calculated, from the outside. But d’Artagnan’s talent, at managing to become the friend of three men who had effortlessly sidestepped the efforts of anyone else who had tried to do the same for nearly five years, is a lack of caution or artifice. It is d’Artagnan’s blessing that he has not had the experiences that would teach him to train that vulnerability out of him, that he has not taken the lesson that that kind of open-heartedness is a risky proposition to heart.

Or so Athos likes to tell himself. The idea that it is some intangible quality of d’Artagnan’s, one that will survive beyond youth and through any hardship, is a hope so unlikely that to think about it is depressing.

“I’m glad,” d’Artagnan says quietly, “that you are being a friend to her.”

“I’m afraid she is getting far less out of our acquaintance than I am,” Athos responds.

D’Artagnan just waits for him to continue. For someone as rash and carried away by emotion as he can be, d’Artagnan also has the most extraordinary talent for silence. Athos is used to silence, in many of the guises it might take. As an oppressive force (his own), as a strategy (his parents), as a mockery (his brother), as a fascination (his wife), but he has never experienced it as the gift that d’Artagnan’s silence always seems to be, a generosity existing in absence.

“I think I have been using her as a sort of confessional.”

Maybe a curse, rather than a gift. Athos has the idea that he isn’t the only person who has found themselves opening up to d’Artagnan more than they would be naturally inclined otherwise.

D’Artagnan grins, although he looks like the image that Athos’ words created have made him ache.

“Does she make for a decent priest?”

“No. You can’t work her up to any righteous judgement at all.”

“Really,” d’Artagnan says dryly, as if he can easily imagine Constance achieving that state.

“Really. Fond exasperation, yes but that is far more effective than anything a priest offers.”

Athos feels again as if he has revealed too much, if not in the words themselves than in the quiet, grateful tone they are uttered in. He thinks that if it was him, and he was the first person to discover the true value of Constance Bonacieux, he would be jealous at anyone else catching on, getting even a small shared glimpse of that brightness.

D’Artagnan just smiles, a nearly physical warmth blooming out of him, a fraction of his sadness lifting off of him, apparently all at the thought of Athos with Constance, as if that is almost as good as d’Artagnan being there himself.

 

* * *

 

On one of his calls to Constance, she makes some joke to Athos about the poor nature of their shared matrimonial history. She freezes after the words have left her mouth, a look of both guilt and a determination not to be guilty appearing on her face and gone just as quickly.

Before he considers the words, Athos says, “I did not have a bad marriage.”

He instantly sees in the sudden stiffness of Constance’s movements that it was the wrong thing to say, as if he is reproaching her for her expression of discontent, even as mild and filled with hollow humor as it was. He wants to call the words back, but is swept up in a sudden selfishness to speak, for the first time ever, of the reality of that chapter of his life.

Constance’s wary look transforms into one of naked interest with a swiftness that amuses him. He remembers d’Artagnan’s comment on her talent at disguising her feelings, and feels a rush of unearned warmth that she isn’t bothering to do so with him. Although her (completely justified, considering her being kidnapped and held at gunpoint was a direct result) curiosity in hearing the truth about his marriage is blatant, there is an attentive tilt to her head, a patient compassion as she waits for him to continue.

But he doesn’t. He can’t find the words to begin.

Constance, bustling about the kitchen in a task he can’t quite determine, smiles at him and says, “I apologize. I shouldn’t have made the joke. I actually haven’t any idea about your marriage. I mean - that it ended badly I assumed, but I’ve never actually been informed of any details.”

Athos realizes this is true.

For a moment he feels sucker-punched because it is, in a way, the most absurd and facile of second chances. An opportunity he had never considered, and possibly does not deserve, to tell the defining story of his life as he had lived it. To not be condemned to always read it backward, if only for the amount of time it takes him to retell it to Constance. With everything hanging over them, with the weight of the possibility of five years and the best part of himself being destroyed in the telling, he had not considered anything of the sort when finally coming clean to Aramis and Porthos and d’Artagnan.

Maybe it’s unfair to burden a woman who was taken hostage and nearly killed as collateral damage in the final act of the drama with the most honest confession of it’s beginning, but then again perhaps it’s only fitting.

“I loved her.” It feels good to say it. It feels like the closest thing to the truth he’s ever gotten. There is no dark tale here, the kind people tell their children as education. No wicked women, no wicked men, no blood or fire or rope. A man loved a woman and he married her. They got, briefly, the fistful of contentment that the world parcels out in such unequal measure.

Constance does not seem outwardly put out by this sudden change in the conversation.

“That’s generally how it begins,” she says smartly but then, chewing her lip, she reconsiders. “Actually, that isn’t common at all. You were luckier than most.”

“Lucky,” Athos says flatly.

Constance sits down across from him and smiles, impish and sweet all at once. “Well, this far in the story. Most people don’t get to marry for love,” she says simply.

“You’re right. My parents certainly didn’t.”

“See? At least a little bit lucky. Were you happy?”

“Yes.” It comes out so quietly that he fears that Constance might not have heard, that he might have to repeat himself. The thought that he might have to admit it again makes him feel ill.

Athos had been very careful never to think of his marriage in that way. To consciously face the existence of that love and happiness is to also to face the fact of its loss. With this long-delayed acknowledgement the longest part of his life is born again and dies truly and finally in that same instant. To think that five years of clawing himself out of the wreck of that life might have been only the first and easiest part of the process causes a hot fist to lodge itself between his lungs.

But Constance has heard. She smiles at him, sadly, and he wonders what the look on his face must be. “See?” she says with infinite gentleness. “Lucky again.”

He brings him and Anne back to life over and over. As twilight stretches it’s cool fingers across the room, Athos performs this bit of magic again and again, bit by aching bit. The moment of demise comes at the precipice of each piece of the story he parts with, the moment where he speaks the truth and destroys any of the endless, seductive, false possibilities:

_We loved each other always and we had ten children and lived to a fine old age. We loved to begin with, and then tired of each other and took to staring daggers across the meat course, using niceties like weapons. We didn’t love each other ever, but we stood by our good breeding and did our duty and one day woke up to the pleasant surprise of easy, worn, affection._

Athos thinks that at one time, he would have traded everything for a shot at even one of them. That not being the case anymore is something he has only recently begun to regard as a victory.

Constance says nothing when he finishes, but meets his eyes with that easy empathy she possesses in such abundance. With an impulsive movement she leans over and kisses his cheek so lightly that later he thinks he might have imagined it.

 

* * *

 

Constance becomes a widow. This is a relief, if a guilty one.

Constance in the same moment becomes a pauper’s widow, a fact that quickly wipes any newly born feelings of incipient freedom away.

The house is being sold to pay off her husband’s debts. Nothing of her dowry remains (except the nice bed linens, tucked safely in her wedding chest.) He long ago did away with anything of value she had brought to her marriage in his struggle to keep his head above water.

Her family, with an air of weary duty and the doleful, smug looks that often result from an unearned feeling of martyrdom, come to collect her. The consensus on her future seems to be that she will return to her brother’s house as the kind of unwelcome appendage most good families seem to have. Perhaps they will marry her off again, perhaps not.

She sits frozen, garbed in widow’s black, while neighbors truck through to pay their condolences and whispered family conferences are held over whatever is to be done about Constance. She rises from her seat, walks down the stairs, and leaves the house that is no longer hers. She wanders aimlessly for a while, until she realizes that her course has been directed all along, and she is at the gates of the musketeer’s garrison. Where she runs into Athos, and asks him to help find her a job.

 

* * *

 

Now, several hours later, she has opened herself to a rather different sort of conference about her future.

“A job?” Aramis strokes his chin in contemplation.

The three of them sit arrayed in half circle facing her at one of the trestle tables in the courtyard. D’Artagnan sits on the bench beside her, pressed against her from shoulder to thigh, a warm and comforting presence. The four of them had all been on a mission outside Paris, and he had not known her husband was dead. He had fought an admirable but ultimately failed battle not to look too overjoyed about the revelation.

“Yes,” she says firmly, with far more resolution than she feels.

Constance hadn’t expected all of them to take so keen an interest, really. She thinks she had been quite out of her mind, stumbling in her widow’s weeds towards the garrison and then finding Athos, her words spilling out in a torrent she had been incapable of stopping. She had simply looked down the long tunnel of her future, as it appeared to be shaping up, and felt her entire being reject it.

Now these men have looks of utmost concentration on their faces as they consider her ridiculous request. A job? What skills does she have? Who has ever heard of such a thing, a gently bred woman with a family to take care of her voluntarily renouncing it in order to become – what?

“Constance, you mentioned your brother wants you to come live with him.”

Porthos says this gently and without judgement, but she still feels unreasonably defensive at hearing the words, because he is filling in her own thoughts. She fears having to make clear to them exactly what an ingrate she is, to have to say aloud that to go back to her comfortable childhood home is a fate that makes dread curdle in her stomach.

She knows, were she to become her brother’s dependent after finally being released from the shadow of her marriage, it would quickly make that feeling transmute into resentment and bitterness.

Constance can’t express how much she knows that she is teetering on an edge, how she knows if she does not take this chance she never will. She thinks these men might understand that, the feeling of leaping despite not knowing if there is any safe ground to be found, but feeling the weight of your own existence finally caught up with you, hovering at your back, and knowing that to jump is the only option.

“I can’t go back to living with them,” are the words she finally finds, said while looking at her lap and winding her black shawl around her forefinger. Constance does not elaborate, and fights back the guilt at what she is purposefully allowing them to think about her family, her silence an invitation to them to fill in her story with any number of horrors.

Into the pause that follows, Athos says, “The blessings of family, in my experience, are best experienced at a slight distance.” Constance looks up at him, startled. She thinks for a moment that he is subtly condemning her, to speak of her family as a burden to these men who have none, whether through loss or choice. But when she meets his eyes he just shrugs, the gesture speaking of nothing but wry sympathy.

“Well, I would offer to marry you, considering d’Artagnan has been so ungallant to fail to ask, but I am a penniless public servant and I fear it would just leave you worse off,” Aramis says with a wink, and Porthos breaks into laughter at d’Artagnan’s noise of outrage.

 

* * *

 

They break up soon after that, having come to no satisfactory conclusion, but with all four men swearing, with every appearance of seriousness, to put their minds to the question. D'Artagnan insists on walking her at least part of the way home. As soon as they are outside the gates of the garrison, he pulls Constance into his arms and she goes willingly, burying her face into the side of his neck.

“I would - I want nothing in the world so much as to marry you. But I am even poorer than Aramis,” he says with a laugh, running an adoring hand over her hair. “And besides, I don’t think it would be what you want right now, is it? You should have time to be sure.”

Constance pulls back, wiping her eyes hastily with the back of her hands. “I am sure. But you’re right. It isn’t what I want.”

She considers what she had said and says in horror, “What I mean is -” but d’Artagnan is just smiling at her, warm and open. Constance wonders if she will ever stop marveling at that generosity of affection, that honesty of feeling.

“Why don’t you want to go live with your family, Constance? Believe me, I don’t want you to, but it would only be for a while.”

“But it wouldn’t.” Constance can’t stop the way the words tumble out, frustrated and almost panicked with the sudden need to make someone understand. “If I - if I go back to them when I have a chance - a mad, idiotic chance, I know - I know I’ll never get out. I’ll be that girl who married Monsieur Bonacieux again forever.”

Suddenly Constance is crying. She hasn’t cried, yet, hasn’t felt like it. Even at the worst moments of her life, like after watching d’Artagnan’s impossibly dear face shutter closed, transformed into a grim mask by the words she had been forced to speak, the urge to stifle her tears, to physically hold back the tide, fist to her mouth, was nearly overwhelming. She did not cry over the death of her brother Aumary, even. She’d screamed herself hoarse, but had not allowed herself the luxury of tears. For some slight loss, like the death of a man she had loathed, for the breaking open of the comfortable dull life she had resigned herself to forever, she could find no tears at all.

But now she is crying like she did when she was very small, with her entire body. She wonders when you lose that, this surety that your pain is a thing that has a right to exist in the world. That it’s expression is justified, no matter how small or worn a thing it may be. Constance wonders what it is about d’Artagnan, the way he looks at her, that is restoring it to her.

“Alright,” he says, that simple, no qualifications, and she loves him more in that moment than she ever has.

D’Artagnan takes her into his arms again and murmurs comforting nonsense against her cheek. She can feel the whispers of the passerby, at a woman in widow’s black weeping in the arms of a handsome young soldier, but cannot bring herself to care.

 

* * *

 

They had, indeed, found her a job. Constance reflects, looking around the tiny room that she is now to call home, that for four men who constitute the best that France has to offer, the plan is perhaps lacking in originality, but she isn’t complaining.

“This favor means we are going to be marching to Treville’s tune for months.” Aramis’ voice floats from up the stairwell, and then so does the grunt that follows, from someone presumably elbowing him in reprimand. Constance feels a small smile forming, the only outward sign of the petrified glee roiling within her, as Aramis arrives in the doorway, Porthos and D’Artagnan at his heels.

“Technically, aren’t you already marching to Treville’s tune?” Constance says as she takes the box containing her scant worldly possessions from Aramis’ arms.

“There is a great deal of distance between theory and practice with Treville,” he replies.

“And anyway, it isn’t a bad tradeoff. The regiment’s needed the sort of thing you’re going to do for a long time.” This, from Porthos.

“And, of course, Widow Bonacieux, the pleasure of your frequent company is worth any hardship.” The slick charm of Aramis’ speech is belied by the wholly genuine smile that accompanies it.

Somehow, though it seems rather impossible to Constance, the four of them have managed to get her the dubious position of woman-of-all-work to the regiment, a faintly scandalous job with vague and unspecified duties. (“I feel it only fair to inform you that outsiders will assume you’re prostituting yourself,” Aramis had felt compelled to tell her. Porthos and d’Artagnan had glared at him and Athos had said “He’s right.”)

So be it. Do a thing thoroughly or not at all had always been a motto she wished to adhere to but felt she never quite achieved, but she supposes when it comes to casting off all propriety it’s the only way.

She doesn’t like to think about the conversations with her family. Her brothers were at first completely incredulous, but they moved quickly to questioning her sanity, and finally alluding grimly to the whispered gossip they had heard from the neighbors. Although none had ever actually came out and called her names, she suspected it was a close thing.

They had made empty threats of tying her up and dragging her home, of involving the law, but in the end they recognized that there was nothing that they could do, but frostily gather their things and return home. The unspoken implication that they might speak to her again once she returned to her senses but not a second before had lay heavy in the air between them.

Constance had taken what little money she had, what had not gone towards paying her husband’s debt, pocket change really, and rented this small room in the house of a baker’s wife. The building hugged the wall of the musketeers garrison, the closest thing she could get to being within the compound itself.

Which was necessary, at least according to her hazy notion of what services she would be providing for the regiment. Laundering their clothes and mending their garments, she supposes, perhaps cooking a little. She imagines it will be hard and not particularly exciting work. No great change, then, from her old life, and at the same time alien in every possible way.

Constance wishes she were a strong enough person that she could say she had not had moments where she wished her husband alive again, just so she could trade this fear of what was to come to rest again in that cold respectability. She is proud of herself that those moments are few and far between.

She realizes as she’s thinking this that she has sat down on the bed and must be looking rather lost, if the looks of concern cast between the men are anything to go bye, but she is interrupted from her intention to reassure them by Athos appearing in the doorway, a cloth-wrapped bundle resting under his arm.

Aramis strides over to him and says, “Finally!” while taking the package and whipping away its cloth wrapping with a flourish, turning around to show Constance and the rest what looks to be a truly expensive bottle of wine.

“The celebration can now begin,” Athos says dryly.

“Celebration?”

“To your new life!” Porthos pronounces, while d’Artagnan, from where he has come to set beside her on the cot, whispers into her ear, “To you.”

Constance doesn’t cry, but it’s a near thing, mingled terror and joy and love and gratitude coming out instead as near hysterical laughter, which the rest politely ignore. She squeezes d’Artagnan’s hand, tight enough to hurt, but he doesn’t say a thing, just smiles at her, dazzlingly bright, a personal sun.

They drink well into the night, everyone arranging themselves on the uncomfortable floor and telling stories. Even Constance, though her tales of childish intrigue with her brothers pale in excitement to that of soldiering and sailing and even to, from Athos, being a nobleman’s son, which as it turns out is a strange business. Constance falls asleep sometime after midnight and doesn’t stir when they leave, and despite her throbbing hangover wakes in the morning with a feeling of perfect contentment the likes of which she hasn’t felt in years.

 

* * *

 

The next night, d’Artagnan comes to her, looking slightly unsure of his welcome. She’s dragged him in by the collar and is kissing him with a hunger that outstrips even that first real kiss in her husband’s kitchen before he can even open his mouth to ask permission to enter.

In the stress of her life changing so abruptly and dramatically, and the time-consuming nature of the practical considerations, they haven’t had a chance to do this, and she is desperate for it. It has been many months since she told him they were a beautiful dream while standing on her front step, but it feels so much longer.

His moment of hesitation is gone as if it never existed. She’d been surprised, a bit, to discover that being with d’Artagnan wasn’t a thing that diminished over time. Some small, bitter part of her had hoped that would be the case, that it was a thing that could be gotten out of her system, that he would break her heart before anything could break his. But it didn’t. He always kissed her with that same ferocious, all-consuming concentration.

Constance lets herself be swept away by it, by the still bright bursts contentment and excitement so potent that all day they have caused her to duck into doorways and behind buildings to smother near hysteria. It had seemed that her skin could barely contain all that feeling, but they are now made both manifest and steady in the hot touch of d’Artagnan’s hands.

It is only after, lying there with all their limbs in the tiny bed by only the barest of technicalities, that she finally crashes. She does not even feel the inclination to tears, this time, but instead begins to shake, from her head to her toes. Constance knows d’Artagnan can feel the tremors, from where every inch of him is pressed to every inch of her.

“Constance,” d’Artagnan says gently, stroking a finger between her eyes, down her nose, tapping at the tip.

“Sorry,” Constance says, ridiculously enough. She knows, if she knows anything, that d’Artagnan is the one person she never has to apologize to for an excess of feeling. “It just keeps hitting me all over again, what I’ve done.”

D’Artangnan says, “Me too,” he says in a tone of dazed, happy wonder and Constance kisses the corner of his mouth of his mouth in gratitude, before his follow up sentence sinks in, and then she is kissing him for real:

“Not only the kindest and most generous woman in France, but the bravest, as well.”

 

* * *

 

Constance’s expectations of a life of dull domestic labor are destroyed only two days into her new found employment.

She’s crossing the courtyard, basket full of unmentionables a host of eager musketeers had been keen for her to mend resting on her hip. Without warning, Athos appears as if by magic in front of her, taking her arm with his eyes darting about in a look that says he is trying to be furtive but is missing the mark, and hisses, “Come with me.”

She makes some vague noises about all the work she has to do, and who exactly do they think they are, dragging her away from the job they themselves had acquired for her, but there is no real question of her putting down the basket and following.

A few minutes later, huddled in some abandoned corner with the others, and she supposes she shouldn’t really be surprised.

“Again,” Constance says flatly. “You want me to play a prostitute again.”

D’Artagnan looks apologetic. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we couldn’t think of any other women.”

“Oh, that’s flattering.”

“Any other woman we trust to help us on this,” Athos says softly, and she’s guessing he knows how exactly efficient that simple statement will be at getting through her defenses. Constance would wonder if he’s telling the truth but she knows he is, merely because she thinks it might be true that she is the only woman the four of them are actually friends with.

She feels surprise for a second at the quickness her mind provided the label of ‘friend’. All the months she had known them she had resisted it, without even realizing she was doing so. Constance, from the moment she had met d’Artagnan, had been putting so much of herself and her heart at risk of hurt, more than she ever had in her entirety of her previous life. To add other things she might lose - friendship, easy understanding, staunch defenders - in the form of the other three men was a prospect too heavy to bear.

Another fear was that the embarrassing intensity of the tenderness she felt for them all was nowhere near reciprocated. But now Constance decides that she is done with half measures in this, as well. If they can ask her to go undercover as a working girl, she is going to own their friendship fully.

Still, to maintain the spirit of things, she makes a show of sighing heavily, uncrossing her arms reluctantly while she gives her acquiescence.

 

* * *

 

On hearing the plan in it’s entirety, her first impulse is flight.

Months ago, she had hinted to Athos the truest and longest lasting hurt of her abduction by Milady and Sarazin, and that was the incidental nature of it. It was a thing that should have been visceral and present, realer in it’s violence than the haze that her everyday life had become by that point.

Instead, it had been like something that had happened to someone else, because the entire thing was as much about Constance as it was about the Pope. She was just a interchangeable pawn in a drama that had nothing to do with her. So little to do with her, a self-recriminating voice had taunted, that they never even bothered to warn her of their plans, of the existence of any danger at all.

So now, when they inform her that she is to play an impoverished peasant girl newly come to Paris so she can be conveniently kidnapped by a man running a trafficking business, his strategy based around countless vulnerable girls fitting that exact description, a bull-headed resistance is her initial response. And not because of any danger to her person, as she supposes their prepared counterarguments expect.

Once again, a nasty inner voice whispers to her, _you are incidental_. It is a feeling, she now realizes, that lurks behind everything. Monsieur Bonacieux would have been content to marry any decently bred, reasonably presentable young woman. In the end, probably far more content with anyone else of that description besides her. That same voice tries to tell her that d’Artagnan, his heart so primed for love, grieving and a stranger, would have attached itself to the first pretty girl to show him any kindness. She just happened to be the one thrown in his path at the right moment.

With an abrupt, stubborn determination, she dismisses all of this. She resolves to vanish that voice for good. If that dogged feeling of being a spectator in her own life had been the weight around her ankle, surely the last few days have served to cast it off. She can do nothing better to erase that feeling of inconsequentiality than to live her life with as much weight and presence as she could find it in herself to muster.

If d’Artagnan at first loved her because she was a lone kind face, then she first loved him because he was the door through which she could glimpse a life far richer than she had ever before dared to imagine. He both created that door and gave her the newborn, shuddering courage to contemplate what lay beyond. The door is still there, open, but now it is up to her to step through it and finally close it behind her, to continue opening every one she finds after.

So she does.

 

* * *

 

This poetic resolution is far away, late the next night, when Constance is freezing, wet, muddy, and crouching in a dank cellar somewhere on the city’s outskirts.

The plan: her carefully supervised abduction, allowing for the musketeers to track where he was taken, and thus discover the location of her abductor's headquarters.

It had all been good fun until now, when Constance is being hauled to her feet by an appropriately rough looking man and being led through a warren of underground passages to God knows what fate, with her erstwhile rescuers nowhere in sight.

When they pass and stairway leading upwards and possibly out into the open, Constance decides she can’t afford to wait any longer. She can’t afford to worry over whatever thing has obviously held the others up, and right now, with only one thug to deal with rather than more, is her best chance.

Constance stumbles delicately, letting her body go limp, until it seem that the man’s bruising grip on her arm is the only thing holding her upright. As he turns to look at her, she commences a full-on and hopefully authentic appearing swoon. When he is suitably distracted by this turn of events, she knees him between the legs and while he’s on the floor whimpering grabs his own club from his belt and brains him with it.

Then she’s up the stairs, into a large, echoing warehouse, where her white knights are struggling to fight a horde of men, all looking like the one she’d just left behind’s even uglier brothers.

“Constance!,” d’Artagnan shouts with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation warrants, skidding up to where she, stands, panting. “Here!” Having gifted into her hands a musket, he turns around again to confront the goon at his heels.

She does not end up using the gun, and indeed spends most of the next ten minutes before the musketeers prevail doing her best to just dodge fists and kick in strategic places, all the while yelping in fear.

But after, sweaty and with her hair hanging down in lank fistfuls in front of her eyes, tossing off a saucy, “Well, what took you all so long?,” she thinks back to that awful, famished feeling that has been her companion for so long, that lack of a future because there was no future she could think of that would satisfy it, and finds it answered. In the heady adrenaline of the fight, in the quips Aramis throws over his shoulder as he binds the men’s hands, in Porthos’ toothy grin as he drags them to their feet, in Athos’ small, guarded smile, in d’Artagnan’s hand on her shoulder. It is still a desire without name, a want beyond speech, but now her heart finds the joy, the blessing, in that thrilling unknown as its each beat spells out: _this, this, this, I want this, I get to have this._

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t stop there.

From what Constance can infer, what the musketeers (or rather, these four of them) had truly been lacking was a woman in order to put into motion all sorts of plans to strike at the heart of Parisian crime. It is almost as if the mere fact of Constance’s presence, and what that presence could help them accomplish, has unleashed some collective desire to be crusaders for justice that had hitherto lain unawakened in them. After outlining the latest way they wish to use her, she broaches her theory.

“I just didn’t think you all...cared.”

“Don’t care about what?,” Porthos said absently from where, for no apparent reason, he has d’Artagnan in a headlock.

Your jobs, is what she thinks, which she supposes isn’t fair or exactly what she means. But for all the fact that they look the definition of heroism when walking as one through the streets, their strides perfectly matched, she had never gotten the impression that a humanitarian impulse was close to their hearts.

Which isn’t to say that aren’t good and compassionate men, all. But the priority of king and country was obviously a dull and distant third for them. After the obvious first one - each other, the second most likely to get them to do anything was, “Because it would make a good story later.” It is just that now, in their quest to drag her into all sorts of escapades, they had taken the tactic that nothing more than a pure desire to help the downtrodden was behind it.

It’s a bit irritating. The reason she agreed to their ever more elaborate schemes was the same one that resulted in their continued coming up with them - it was a very, very good time.

Instead of any of this, she says, “Well...altruism, particularly.”

Three faces, practically bleeding woundedness, and Athos, quickly turn to look at her, and in an instant she isn’t annoyed, only filled with a rush of fondness at the fact that four grown men have perhaps after all bought into the romantic fantasy of their chosen profession, just a little.

But even that, her burgeoning career as an honorary musketeer, such as at is, does not seem to her to be even the most significant change to come out of this new life.

Although she continues to officially board with the baker’s family, in practice d’Artagnan smuggles her into his quarters at the garrison more nights than not. Almost her every moment is spent in the company of the others. She knew they lived in each other’s pockets, and she is admitted to the fold with an ease that leaves her more touched than she lets on.

The first time she finds herself in the courtyard with d'Artagnan nowhere to be found, she almost turns on her heel and marches back out again, but immediately Porthos’ voice calls her over to where he and Aramis are talking, and he insists on fixing d’Artagnan’s grievous oversight in failing to train her in hand-to-hand combat. Which he does, coaching her gleefully until she is able to land a blow to Aramis’ jaw.

“Not that that’s difficult, but a little work and you may to take me on,” Porthos says with a wink.

“Impossible,” Aramis huffs out, looking very pleased with himself. “That isn’t an insult against you, my dear. But the man’s unmovable.”

“You’re just put out that _you_ can’t move me,” Porthos responds, and then they’re off.

Constance is sure that she and d'Artagnan, are, at this point, beyond insufferable. Even more than those few borrowed weeks the previous year, they are so swept up by that heady rush of each other that Constance feels as if she is in a constant state of drunkenness. The first time one of the others catches them in an embarrassing position because they’ve chosen their location based on factors other than practicality is a shock, but by the third she feels like an old hand.

Then there is Athos.

If there is a reason she is able to think of those months following her abduction with anything other than a sense of sucking, black despair, it is him.

In her first weeks, she had the feeling that Athos was avoiding her. An unsubstantiated and silly one, surely, because she is soon spending nearly as much of her time with him as with d’Artagnan. Frequently it is the three of them together, but often she finds herself in idle moments, in one-on-one conversations with Athos, very much like the ones they used to have at her husband’s house.

She has the slow pleasure of realizing, at this late stage in her life, of the beauty of multiple relationships that each provide different things, each nourishing a particular part of her soul. She realizes that in allowing herself this, putting select parts of herself in each friendship, is not a risk of inadvisable danger, but a creation of a safe harbor. D’Artagnan, with all his warmth and brilliance removing the greyness from her life, cannot give her exactly what Athos does in these quiet conversations. She feels that she knows Athos well enough by now when she thinks that they both share the same terror and laughing amazement of two people who life has taught an unbending policy of denial and vigilance, now tentatively taking their first steps from those self-made cages.

One day, she ventures a much modified version of this idea, couched in practical and self-deprecating language, and Athos looks so shocked that for a moment she thinks she must have offended him in some way.

“What?” she says defensively, rather than apologize, and that’s a good a marker of this deeper friendship as she could imagine.

Athos gives his usual heart aching half-smile. “Nothing. It’s just that I always credited you as much as d’Artagnan for any change you might have noted in me.”

“Me?” Constance says blankly. Trying to think back to his visits, and the dominant feeling was always one of inadequacy, attempting to give comfort and failing.

“Yes. Do you imagine that d’Artangnan would love anyone any less brilliant than himself?” Constance forgets to answer for long moments because she is too busy wondering if Athos is somehow drunk at noon, to make such a confession. Then she realizes, with dawning wonder, to Athos’ mind, he is merely making a statement of fact.

Constance, if she might say so herself, plays off her shock with ease, tapping her chin thoughtfully and saying, “Hm. You must be right.” But it is a feeling of such warmth that she think it might stay with her always and convince her finally of its truth, to know that Athos, so select with his affections, values her at an equal rate with d’Artagnan, who no one in the world could fail to value beyond measure.

 

* * *

 

The introduction of Constance into their midst, truly and irrevocably, should not have induced any noticeable change in Athos’ life, and yet it did.

The position that they had originally cajoled Treville into offering Constance very quickly falls vacant again. Aramis and Porthos, the latter with a lesser degree of glee than the former, rapidly realize what a superb addition Constance makes to all of their plans.

This, the practical and everyday adjustments, is not what throws Athos precariously off balance. It is a change that lies entirely in himself.

In the last year, so many of assumptions he had built as a protective wall around himself have been chipped slowly away. He has had to confront the untenable nature on which he had based his life, that it was a thing borrowed, only earned through the price of his repentance. His wife’s resurrection showed the futility of that, and thus gave him the terrifying freedom to live his life for himself, for others, a freedom he had long since gained but would not allow himself to face.

The other is the source of this current uneasiness: that he owed pathetic gratefulness for the miracle of Aramis and Porthos’ affection, because it was by nature a temporary thing, to be forcibly removed should they ever discover the full story of his past, has been not only ripped away but supplanted. Not only was their friendship not rescinded, but, incredibly, he has added to the number of people who would seemingly be disappointed should he found dead in the gutter.

With only d’Artagnan’s attachment, with only one person breaking the mold and daring to casually waltz through all of Athos flimsy walls, he could perhaps call it a fluke. One person’s brave, vulnerable heart both surviving the world and choosing to alight it’s brightness on him is a freak accident. Two is something else.

He did not know what he thought would have become of his and Constance’s tenuous friendship now that her lonely circumstances had changed. He hadn’t really thought of it all, but he thinks he half expected it to dissolve naturally. They had turned to each other at a crossroads where that companionship had been able to provide certain things for them. He always felt that whatever poor comfort his company gave in no way equaled what hers had given him. And now she had d’Artagnan once more, whose adoration and happiness are so blindingly obvious that it makes him hard to look at. He would expect, from his own experience of that sort of love, that a turning inward, a reduction of their world to encompass only each other, is in order.

But no such thing happens.

He can’t define why he at first holds himself apart from them. In no way could there ever be a conflict of interest, any competing claim upon d’Artagnan between Constance and he.

But separately and together, they don’t allow this ridiculous urge. They enfold him into their shared universe as if it is something natural. Sometimes he catches a unreadable look of d’Artagnan’s when he thinks Athos isn’t looking or a certain timbre of Constance’s laugh hits him and he wants - well. Something that has been lost to him, that much he knows.

 

* * *

 

“So, we’re going to this party, and I’m to pretend to be Athos’ wife?” Her voice rises in question on the end. Playing the parts, in the last months, of a fishwife, a beggar, and even, memorably, a nun, have posed little challenge, but pretending to be a wealthy noblewoman is totally outside her realm of experience.

“Not exactly,” Aramis says cheerfully.

“You’re going to be his bit on the side,” Porthos says at the same moment.

“If you want,” d’Artagnan finishes firmly, as he always does.

Which is how she ends up in the gaudy mansion of one of Paris’s most notable and wealthy residents, dressed within an inch of her life in gaudy clothes that Aramis had procured from a mysterious source, at a party of a sort that no man would bring his wife too.

Their goal is to sneak away from the main gathering, and find a letter, containing unspecified yet vitally-important-to-national-security information hidden somewhere in the vast house. D’Artagnan had managed to get hired as extra security for the evening, and Aramis and Porthos are outside, in case anything goes wrong.

Which it might, because _really_ , Athos is giving her nothing to work with.

“They are _suspicious_ ,” she hisses furiously into Athos’ ear, from their station along the back wall.

“That isn’t true.” Athos response is as stiff and distant as the way their arm are looped together, the gaping space between their bodies more like a teenager escorting a maiden aunt than a man his mistress.

It certainly is true. At the clustered card tables, men are engaged in all sorts of activities with their female companions, and she isn’t talking about gambling. Nearly all involve a state of undress. A pink lace garter just flew past Constance’s ear. Their wallbound, puritanical position is distinctly odd, and she has noted one man casting questioning looks their way for the past five minutes. At this rate, they’ll never be able to sneak away undetected. She tells Athos so.

“Anyway, weren’t you one of them once?”

Athos looks comically offended. “No. I wasn’t one of them.” He casts a dark look around the room, while squaring his shoulders in a look of resolution that more resembles a grim march to the gallows, at the same time yanking Constance closer and putting a proprietary hand around her waist. Her breasts in their tight sheathing come to rest snug against his velvet covered arm.

“What? Noveau rich? Aramis is right; you are a snob.” Constance begins to tease, but Athos is already walking them over to the man who was looking askance at them earlier and begins to bray at him in a loud, unrecognizable voice, “So, Monsieur Beauvais, what do you think about the racing season so far, eh?”

It’s a struggle to not let her mouth drop open in shock, the way Athos manages to inhabit the guise of immensely wealthy and even more unbearable in an instant. To cover up her momentary blinking pause, she throws herself with equal enthusiasm into the role, as she understands it, of the grasping social climber. She hangs off Athos’ arm and flashes her ring under Monsieur Beauvais’s mistress’s nose in exchange for forced admiration, an even uglier gemstone is passed under hers for return inspection, all while Athos continues to soliloquize about his fictitious race horse.

Soon enough, a quick exchange of glances with Athos serves as her cue, and Constance excuses herself with coy delicacy, and she is then quickly and silently making her way through the halls, opening door after door looking for the study. D’Artagnan joins her, having watched her make her exit.

They find the study soon enough, or believe they do. A glimpse of a huge walnut desk has them moving quickly inside and the door latching softly shut behind them.

But it isn’t the master’s study, where they have been informed the missive will most likely be, but rather a lady’s sitting room, outfitted entirely in a rather sickly shade of green. The domain of the mistress of the house, surely away in the country for the weekend.

She and d’Artagnan immediately recognize their error, but it doesn’t even take a face as expressive as his to tell Constance instantly that there will be no easy exit.

“What sort of imbecile has a sitting room that only locks from the outside?” Constance has to strongly resist the urge to stomp her foot in frustration.

“Maybe he makes a habit of locking up his wife in here.” In another man this might have come out as joking, but d’Artagnan sounds genuinely worried about the prospect.

“Well, Athos will have to come looking for us eventually.”

“Or someone else,” d'Artagnan says, sounding cheerful about the prospect.  
  
A half hour later, with no sign of rescue in sight, they have found Madame’s considerable supply not of ladylike sherry or wine, but of liquor, and have done away with half a bottle.

“We shouldn’t,” Constance had said, “what if someone other than Athos finds us? We should be alert.”

D’Artagnan had responded that if they were discovered it wouldn’t be suspicious, the most obvious conclusion being that a partygoer had snuck off for some alone time with the hired help. Then he’d winked at her and she’d rolled her eyes and swatted him on the shoulder.

Yet, half hour and half bottle later, here she is foolishly indulging in that very thing, the bodice of her gown loosened to d’Artagnan’s hands, her own hands seeking the laces on his trousers, and pulling out his cock. Constance kisses her way down his neck, nips at his sternum, earning her a hiccuping laugh. With an efficient movement she sweeps her skirts aside to kneel on the floor before him, the carpet rasping pleasantly against her knees through her shift.

She likes doing this. Not only in the sense that she likes everything they do together, in that she likes pleasing him as much as she likes being pleased, but as a desire of it’s own, one she feels in the pit of her stomach sometimes, on getting an unexpected glimpse of his face through a crowd or across a room, a want strong enough to sometimes stop her in her tracks.

He’s hard already, as she smears the wetness at this tip with a broad sweep of her thumb, as his hand settles in her upswept hair, his blunt nails scratching her skin lightly, making the skin at the base off her spine tighten and prickle with goosebumps.

She takes the head of his cock into her mouth, lips protecting him from her teeth. Just the head, just a tight, frictionless suction, punctured and relieved by a careful circle of her tongue, the rest of her hand making a fist just this side of too tight.

Then the door opens.

Several things happen at once. Athos, scarlet up to his hairline, lets his triumphant, “I’ve got the letter!” trail off into a weighty silence. D’Artagnan, making eye contact with Athos and then again with her, gasps; it isn’t one of shock. For the first time Constance can ever remember, he is less than unfailingly polite, his hips shuddering upward spasmodically, helplessly, his cock scraping uncomfortably against her palate for a moment before he regains control of himself. Constance squeezes her knees together, suddenly aware of an overwhelming sensation of wet and gaping emptiness between her legs. She has to dig her nails sharply into the meat of her thigh to prevent her from bunching up her skirts with the other hand and offering herself some relief.

Oh, Constance thinks, oh.

In this this taut, still moment, the door has both closed and Athos realized that it will not again offer him admittance. Constance finally takes her mouth from d’Artagnan’s cock the and wet pop resounds with the leaden pronouncement of a musket shot on the still air.

Constance, feeling far drunker than she has all evening and the alcohol consumed warrants, makes a decision. From where her face is turned toward the crease of d’Artagnan’s hip she raises her eyes to his. They are wider and darker than she has ever seen them.

In that instant, as she again takes d’Artgnan into her mouth, as she meets Athos’ eyes, as a contained lighting storm of desire passes endlessly, as if conducted through their wondering and shocked and wanting gazes, she thinks only _this, this, I want this, I want us to have this._ Later she will think that she opened the gate for them, for Athos and d'Artagnan to be together in this manner, with her, for this new way of expression for d'Artagnan's worship and Athos’ awe, but at the moment she only thinks of herself, the ecstatic monster of her desire, learning to satisfy itself yet again.

She doesn’t tease, now, and it is over in a matter of moments, as she relaxes her throat to take d’Artagnan’s cock as far she can, as her tongue works mercilessly at the vein on the underside, as he comes and somehow she feels as each of them are locking eyes with each other, as their is no divide between their bodies at all.

They manage in a silence not awkward but still heated and charged, to get themselves halfway respectable, but before they are faced with the daunting prospect of having to say anything, the door bursts open, someone is shouting, “There they are!”

They just manage to make an escape with both health intact and the all important letter, and if Aramis and Porthos look at them a bit oddly when they finally manage the rendezvous point, the three of them wild-eyed and incoherent, well, surely that can be attributed to their sudden flight.

 

* * *

 

Athos manages to avoid them for the impressive sum of one day.

So long possessed of the habit of suppressing conscious knowledge of his desire, it had taken something as vivid and forceful as that moment in that sitting room, to clearly elucidate this particular one.

Love, as a thing of creation, of rebirth, of grace: a miracle. Desire, as something other than a punishment, other than an exacted pound of flesh: a revelation.

D’Artagnan and Constance ambush him in his rooms. Their hands are entwined, and their faces wearing the aspect of carefully prepared speech making. What comes out, from Constance’s mouth and with a smile from d'Artagnan is very simple: “We want you. If you want us.”

If. Funny.

“Yes,” his voice comes out a cracked and unwilling thing, but in the face of them, how could he do anything else? “But I don’t know why you would want me.”

For this he has come to know too, in the last twenty-four hours. The concept of being a better man for Aramis and Porthos was an alien one to him, as unfathomable as building the walls of a building before starting on the floor. They were the foundations on which he had built his entire self, the rock that he had shaped himself around in putting down the roots of a new life.

But he wants, if not to be the person that they see, to at least not be a person that has anything to do with breaking that radiant goodness. He thinks of d’Artagnan and Constance and cannot see any way that he can be of service of keeping their twinned bright flame alive, but is wise enough to know that it is nourishing him, forging him once more into something new.

D’Artganan looks indignant at Athos’ insult to himself, and as if he is about to enthusiastically protest, but Constance hushes him, and steps forward, closing some of the distance between them.

“Why not? You have always been capable of putting good out into the world, even at a time when you would never have thought of being able to to have goodness for yourself.”

He looks at her, at the dusky light falling through the high window, the warm illumination of her hair, her neck, and his eyes must ask the question.

“You probably don’t remember, but when my brother died - he was murdered in a tavern brawl, and you happened to come by the scene and you - you were kind. Truly kind, and not falsely so. I looked at you and and thought “he is suffering, like me” and all I wanted to do then and for months after was rip the world apart with my teeth. You’re good, Athos. You have been of value and don’t even realize it. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it takes other people to show us.”

Athos could not find the words to answer this if he tried. He casts his memory back, instead.  
  
“Now I remember,” Athos says softly, for he finds that he does. The red-headed girl wailing on her knees in the mud. Everyone else had been afraid to touch her, the great force of Constance’s grief a palpable thing, like it was something that they might get in their clothes and carry home to their loved ones. That sort of despair had held no fears for Athos. He had found it almost comforting. At the time, he had thought: why shouldn’t you sit down and howl? How did anyone ever haul themselves through their days doing anything but? He had been of half a mind to join her. That would have really given the fine citizens a shock.

Constance advances towards him, and when she reaches to touch his face Athos has to fight not to flinch. He succeeds, barely, but his eyes must betray him. The gentleness with which she lays her fingers to his cheek threatens to bring him to his knees.

“You are out practice with tenderness, aren’t you, Athos?” she says very quietly. “So am I. But I think I am beginning to learn.”

With this, she glances quickly over her shoulder at d’Artagnan across the room, unconsciously, completely instinctive.

Then Constance looks back at him but says nothing, and Athos decides to respond, he makes the choice to repay the gift she has just given him. He takes her hand from his cheek and holds it in his own, then bows his head to press the lightest of kisses to her fingertips. Her other hand comes to rest in his hair. It has a feeling of sudden grace. Not of benediction to a penitent, but a thing shared, pulsing bright and alive between them.

 

* * *

 

Athos has not done this in so very, very long. The associations it brings up are both unwelcome and unconscious, worldless sense memory felt in the pit of his stomach. But he accepts it, rather than fights it. He lets the memories reside coiled in the recesses of his mind so he can focus on the here and now.

His present is a good one, indeed. Athos wonders why it took him so long to realize it, but the way Constance had kissed him, both with that bright confidence and the last traces of trepidation, are as a good an incentive for the revelation as any.

Now Constance pulls away, puts an arm’s length of distance between them. D’Artagnan does not move with her, his shoulder still pressing companionably against Athos’ own, his hand still entwined with hers. Constance’s free hand goes to her shoulder, as if to slide her underdress off it, but then pauses and looks at him, eyes steady in something like a challenge.

Athos takes it. He reaches a trembling hand up, to rest at the silken skin at the base of her throat, his thumb resting where her pulse beats an unsteady rhythm. The rest of his hand runs along the fine ridge of her shoulder, feels the contrast of warm skin laid close over smooth bone and tensed muscle. He can feel how still the three of them are, how intensely aware he is of every exaltation and tremor of flesh.

D'Artagnan puts his arm around Athos’s waist as he slowly, reverently, slides the red cloth from Constance’s shoulder to bare one breast, as she releases D’Artagnan’s hand to let the other one fall, until the entire thing is pooled at her feet and she revealed before them.

Constance at first tremulous, then laughing, says, “You can do more than just look, you know,” and Athos realizes he has been staring, struck dumb with his hand clenched tightly in the fabric of D’Artagnan’s sleeve, for a long while.

This breaks the hushed solemnity that had been cast over everything and d’Artagnan laughs, moves towards her, but then she holds up a hand.

“Wait, I changed my mind.” D’Artagnan stops and goes so still that it is Athos’ turn to smile. The way the his body responds to the simple command in Constance’s voice puts him in mind of a particularly well-trained hunting dog he had in his youth, and is wholly foreign to any response D’Artagnan has ever had to an order from Athos.

“Kiss him,” Constance says, the instruction directed at D’Artagnan but her eyes resting on Athos.

D’Artagnan, despite his earlier total acquiescence to Constance's command, makes no move. He feels it like a shock, the coil of intention, of purposeful desire, the way it ran like a current from Constance to d’Artagnan and now to him.

It is still a heady feeling, that instant of deciding to do something that will have consequences, related to him as a person, rather than as an instrument in the scripted path of penance he had set for himself. Athos feels the familiar terror that deviation will only lead to his hands being responsible for nothing but grief and destruction once again.

D’Artagnan waits. That’s what gives him the courage to finally close the gap and kiss him. The idea that d’Artagnan, reckless and impulsive and luminous, will wait with a taut, eager stillness in the confidence that in this, whatever Athos decides will be perfectly right.

Athos kisses him, and in it finds the belief that he won’t ever have to stop doing so.

They end up on his bed somehow, and then he is kissing Constance, and d’Artagnan is unbuttoning his shirt, and saying, “Do you want me to show you how to touch her?”

He’d ask Constance how she feels about that, but she moans so loudly at the words that he feels d'Artagnan's blooming grin in response, hidden against Athos’ hair, from where his own head is finding rest in the sweet curve of Constance’s neck and shoulder.

Athos slides down Constance’s body, between her legs. Though he is desperately hard, he is glad that they are doing this, first. He doesn’t think he could take, just now, the focus being on himself. He would not be surprised if d’Artagnan sensed that.

He kisses the divot beside Constance’s hipbone, feels his chin brush where she is already wet, hears the breathless _oh_ that falls from her mouth at only that tiny contact. D’Artagnan has moved to her other side, and runs his thumb, very lightly, along her opening. Constance spasms in response, and then is moving her own knees back, baring her innermost places to them more clearly. Athos feels dizzy. He drops his forehead to her hip, breathes in the smell of her, feels d’Artagnan squeeze the back of his neck, very quickly, pressure there then gone, and that’s enough to bring Athos back to himself.

Constance holds herself open, and d’Artagnan says, voice an octave lower than normal, “Yeah, just like that. No a bit rougher,” and he brings her off with two d’Artganan’s fingers crooked inside her and her voice making their names into one unbroken word.

After, d’Artagnan kisses him, and he can feel the erection pressing against his hip, as well as the demands of his own, but he says, hand stroking the back of Constance’s knee and lips to her navel, d'Artagnan's hand in his hair, “Let’s - let’s just stay here a moment."

Constance says, “Sounds perfect.”

D'Artagnan says, “Alright.”

 

* * *

 

Very early the next morning, Constance opens her eyes to be assaulted by the sight of Aramis and Porthos, arrested by shock in Athos’ doorway. Aramis says smugly, “I knew there was something off about the three of them the other day.” Porthos looks suspiciously teary-eyed but is grinning in happiness.

Athos, from the where d'Artagnan's embrace has him seemingly pinned to the wall, says groggily, “Fuck off, you two.”

Constance lets her eyes drift shut once more.


End file.
